Over the past few weeks we’ve held a number of marketing workshops to get our community ready for the Firefox 3.5 launch. We covered a number of areas that will help raise awareness and get people excited about the fasted Firefox ever!

I focused on how students can contribute during my Campus Reps workshop, which covered the following activities:

Writing an article about or review of Firefox 3.5 for the school newspaper, magazine, and/or blog.

Setting up a Firefox Help Desk to provide support and educate people about new features, cool Add-ons, and other tips and tricks for Firefox 3.5.

Posting to social networks like Facebook or Twitter with updates about why you love Firefox 3.5

Throwing a launch party and/or download fest to celebrate the release of Firefox 3.5 and encourage people to download and install or update from previous versions.

More details for those activities and others can be found in the Campus Reps Guide. Since many students may not be around campus during the launch, just remember you can still get involved in your town, wherever you might be traveling during the summer, or even at home!

We hope that these workshops and our open Community Marketing Team meetings will provide everyone an opportunity to learn more about how they can get involved and make a huge impact during the Firefox 3.5 launch!

Seth Bindernagel (l10n community lead) and Rishi Mallik (one of our interns) started a CRM project back in 2007 to build a database of Mozilla contributors. They evaluated a number of CRM solutions and developed a proof of concept built on Durpal + CiviCRM. After their demo and some discussion around how we might use it, the project lost traction and was shelved. I’ve spent the past few months reviving the Mozilla CRM project and we’re just getting started with development now.

I gave a quick presentation on the project at the Mozilla All-Hands today and we had good discussion around the scope of the tool and the value it will bring to various groups within the Mozilla community. Check out the slide deck for more info:

As development gets underway, I hope key stakeholders and community members will share their ideas and provide feedback so we can continue to refine the features and functionality to create a tool that will help us all work better together.

I think a lot of folks understand the need for a centralized database of our community, and I hope the Mozilla CRM project will finally give us a way to not only bring together our community, but also give everyone a chance to explore the entire Mozilla Universe.

It’s long overdue, but after a couple of years of running the Mozilla Campus Reps program, we finally have an official logo! I’m excited to have an identity for our campus efforts and the logo is the first step in making the program and our reps more visible in the greater Mozilla community… and the world.

The logo, which I am dubbing “the shield”, was the first phase of a project I’m working on with Nobox. We’re currently creating a fresh new design for the online Campus Reps Guide, which we also plan to offer in print for our Back to School campaign (Fall ’09).

With an image our reps can now call their own… I can’t wait to see what we do with it. I’m already thinking about posters, t-shirts, and even business cards for our top reps! 😉

UPDATE: Thanks for all the wonderful comments, and also the honest opinions. It looks like there is a lot of interest in creating buttons/badges, t-shirts, cards, etc… so just wanted to let everyone know that I will draft up some guidelines and let you know soon how we can all use the logo for our projects. I appreciate your enthusiasm and patience while I sort all that out.

With some help from Mozilla Japan we were able to get a fun new “Holi” Foxkeh image created quickly… and FuzzyFox worked with a few folks to get his e-card updated.

What we have now is an awesome Holi e-card that will allow you to send a special note to your family and friends (and a message to us at Mozilla) to celebrate this colorful “Holi-day”. 😉 So go check it out!

Zach Carter, one of our Campus Reps, attended the Engineering Expo 2009 at the University of South Florida a couple of weeks ago. As many of our reps do, he decided to setup a booth to spread Firefox on his campus.

The College of Engineering was hosting the expo and Zach decribed it as “a college level science fair, including tons of robots, cars, Tesla coils and other engineered eye candy”. However, he decided to skip the robots and focus on art.

You might be thinking, “Art at a science fair?”… yes, that’s right. Many attendees knew about Firefox, but very few knew that it was an open source product. Some of them didn’t understand what “open source” meant, so Zach took the creative approach to educate them through his “Open Art Project”.

In the absence of robots, I wanted to present something that could capture the attention of the kids and be accessible to them, but also teach something valuable. The idea for them to collaborate on art rather than source code formed from this. – Zach

What a simple, yet effective way to tackle one of challenges many of us in the Mozilla community have from time to time… explaining what “open source” really means.

Our Mozilla Campus Reps wrapped up the “On the Street” Interviews project in December and produced some very cool videos. There were 12 submissions from our reps in the US and in India… and I hope that future projects like this will allow us to see more of the world as reps in other countries get involved.

I wanted to share all of the great videos with the Mozilla community…and congratulate Mauricio, Fazulul, and Galen on their videos, which were voted the “Top 3 Favorites” by the Mozilla marketing team.

Here are the 2008 Campus Reps “On the Street” videos with some comments from our reps about their experience:

By knowing how much time of our life is spent online, the purpose of this video was to capture people’s feelings and preferences regarding Internet Browsers. We received a lot of help from different people who supported Firefox and believed that making this video was a good cause. Among this people are the Camera Man and Editor, “Kleber Garcia”, who managed to borrow a professional camera from his job; The people behind ACM Florida Tech Chapter, who provided us with their time and support; And the Christian / Emo / Happy Hardcore artists from Solo, Norway “Shari Vari” who granted us permission for using their music.

It was really an awesome experience hearing the exceptional usefulness of Firefox from the public.It made me to think that people are very much aware of the world’s most fastest,safe and useful browser “Mozilla Firefox”. In this on the street experience, i met loads of people. They find Firefox as their best companion when it comes to surfing or searching…while there are only few who have little knowledge of just loading web pages through firefox. And there are even few who haven’t heard of Firefox and still stick on to the old default Windows browser “Internet Explorer”. I took this opportunity to teach and show them that there is Firefox for them to lead. I also helped them come out of that little knowledge and made them use the world’s fastest browser “Mozilla Firefox”. I helped installing them the recent firefox and showed them the difference in speed for loading webpages between Firefox and IE. Also I explained them of the useful features like add-ons, private data clearing, player integration, download manager integration, popup blockers, etc…

I really enjoyed interviewing my teachers to create this video. For me, it was interesting to hear about all my teachers experiences with Firefox. I never really thought about their opinions on the subject. I was surprised to learn that a lot of my interviewees preferred Firefox over IE. I had always thought of my self as one of the lone Firefox users, trying heard to convert the others. Creating this video really helped me think about the fact that some of my teachers really care about open source software. Also, it was a great opportunity to have a much needed laugh.

The interview were mostly conducted amongst MBA students who are normally not that “Tech” savvy. Quite a bunch of them still use internet explorer.
It was a wonderful experience talking to people about firefox and mozilla in general. I got to meet some die hard firefox fans to some who had absolutely no idea what mozilla was. It was amazing to see some of them belonging to the same campus but such a vast difference in the awareness about mozilla. One thing which was common across people was that all of them who used Firefox were very proud of the fact.

We visited a couple of places, and it was an amazing experience speaking to many people. It was embarrassing and funny in the beginning, eventually we got a hang of it and it was fun indeed. We made a compilation of the funniest and best interviews which would of course make the video a bit interesting to watch.

I am Udit Sharma & I am Campus REP of Kautilya Institute of Technology & Engineering, Jaipur. While shooting this interview, I enjoyed a lot, it was amazing experience. While shooting the videos, I concluded that 4 out of 10 people don’t know about Mozilla and don’t know about Firefox…. I am shocked!! to observe this in my city Jaipur. Even the lecturers & professors of my neighborhood campus i.e. Apex Institute of Engineering & Technology, Jaipur don’t know about Firefox, if they would.. than they don’t know that Firefox is Free, open source etc. They are still using boring, slow, MS Internet Explorer…. I interviewed the professors of my neighborhood campus and included in my On the Street Interview. I told many people about Mozilla Firefox and its features and most of them promised me to use Firefox as there default browser. I observed many people saying that they know about Firefox but they don’t bother to download Firefox and than using it…….as…Firefox doesn’t come default with the MS Windows…as 75% users are still using Windows….. Some people comments are funny & crazy and some people are really have knowledge about Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, Open Source etc… I think this “On the Street” project helped me a lot to understand people minds for WEB etc. I am always ready for these kind of projects and I can do anything to promote Mozilla products….. MOZILLA ROCKS!!!!!!

I was amazed at the response that students were ready to give, even though many of them were not aware of Firefox or Open Source or the difference between Mozilla and Firefox. But I was glad to know that all of them have at least heard of Firefox, may they not be using it. Anyhow, I had a fun session making them aware of the browser and trying to convert them to it!

My on the street experience was good.. I met people who weren’t really all that computer literate. I wish I could have done a more professional campus sorta footage. i had some hilarious incidents too.. like when I told people to try out firefox for mobiles when its released,one girl joked by showing her nokia 1100 set and said nothing could be used on her mobile…! on the whole it was a fun-filled session.

The campaign was started in the first week on November. Initially I started alone capturing videos in my home locality, at my campus asking questions to my classmates and neighbours. In the second week, I went to shopping mall (Big Bazaar) after buying a mini DV video cassette along with two of my friends in the evening and asked questions to everyone around the mall. The mall security persons and policemen did ask some questions to us to know what we were doing, and we answered that its a marketing project for our college exams… Thankfully they dint ask us to show our mozilla ids.. ( i had ur letter ready in my bag which u had sent the other day, to show them in case they ask)… We gave them mozilla goodies and they thanked us.. The very next day there was Abode Boot camp goin on in the other part of the city.. I went there with my friend and questioned two guys there, and they answered really well… We thought marketing mozilla in abode boot camp may lead to problems, so we just listened to some demos there and returned back… Some video coverage was also done by me in the parking lot of my campus asking questions to 1st, 2nd, 3rd and final year students , to check their Mozilla Knowledge.. Finally, it was a great experience for me and my friends. All the speakers of the On the Street campaign video were given a set of Mozilla goodies containing stickers, hats, lanyards, badges etc.. Hope you and Mozilla team will love watching this video and also the other Mozilla Campus Reps who havnt started with the campaign yet will get some idea

Thanks to all the reps that participated and for everyone that helped review the videos. I am working to put together the best clips from all the submissions into one highlight reel that we will be showcasing on Air Mozilla and YouTube in early 2009… so keep an eye out for that.

It’s been a long road since I first got the old QMO site up and running and tried to convince people that it was the future of Mozilla QA. After over a year and a half of experimentation, discussion, design, development, and testing… I am proud to announce the launch of the “official” QMO beta.

This project was really born in the early days of the Mozilla Foundation when Asa, Chofmann, Cbeard and I were throwing around ideas of what a Mozilla QA site might look. It took a while to get enough QA resources to allow me to dedicate time to thinking about QA community planning, but in 2007 I decided to build a new home for Mozilla QA. I had always felt that something was missing and that we needed a place to call our own on the Web.

While we used to rely on our team mailing list and the QA blog on mozillaZine, we now have a robust community website that I believe will help bring the Mozilla QA team and our growing community of volunteers together. We will be able to better collaborate to improve the quality of all Mozilla products and services, and QMO will provide a place for others to join us and learn more about Mozilla QA.

As some of you already know, I’ve been transitioning from engineering to marketing over the past few months and the QMO project is my last project as a QA guy. It has been quite a journey watching the team grow from 3 people in 2004 to over 20 today. We have accomplished so much in those 4 years and I hope QMO will bring the team even more success in the future.

I like to look at QMO as my farewell gift to the Mozilla QA team. I have put so much time and energy into this project that it’s sad I won’t be using it every day. However, I am confident that my QA comrades will make good use if it.

We wanted to tell people about a few Firefox Add-ons, including holiday themes and helpful shopping extensions, and give them a chance to try out our Fashion Your Firefox collections! There are also some nice “Tips for Online Shopping” that will help people shop safely and securely on the Web.

And since this is the season for giving, we wanted to tell folks about the amazing t-shirt designs at the Mozilla Community Store and other gift ideas for family and friends. Every year there are also community members that create some great artwork for the holidays, so we wanted to showcase some of that creativity as well.

This year, even I got into the spirit and created a couple of banners to share! Feel free to put them up on your blogs and websites. 😉 Thanks to Monique Johnson for the initial artwork and to Ken Saunders at AccessFirefox.org for the ornaments.

This is our second year running the Mozilla Campus Reps program and we have already signed up 550 reps…with even more on the “waitlist” to get on our official roster. We’ve come a long way since working with about 50-60 students last year… and the community is growing quickly! A program that kicked off with the release of the Firefox Campus Edition and a small “Back to School” program in 2007 is now one of the fastest growing Mozilla communities in 2008.

We’re building a strong network of students and faculty around the world to help promote Firefox and educate folks about Mozilla and our mission. In order to help me better plan campaigns and projects for them to participate in I included a short survey during the registration process that ran from August – October 2008.

I’m starting a series of blog posts about our Campus Reps community to share some interesting numbers that have emerged from the responses we received. First, I will break down where our Campus Reps are, including the countries (61 and counting) they represent and some of the colleges and universities they cover. Then I’ll look into what they’re doing on the Web and some of their favorite social networks (Facebook was popular) and Firefox Add-ons. And finally, I wanted to share some of the great feedback and ideas they have shared with me about how they represent Mozilla and promote Firefox with colleagues, family, and friends. Here’s what one rep had to say:

“Working at the computer help center on campus, dealing with students who are having severe connectivity or popup issues, it’s easy converting to something that JUST WORKS! Speed, open source, works the same as what you already have just better!”

Please join me in welcoming our Mozilla Campus Reps for 2008-09 and look forward to learning more about them in my upcoming posts. Thanks!